Coming Back to Yourself: Healing After Narcissistic and Emotional Abuse
Emotional abuse is often subtle. It doesn’t always leave visible bruises, but it can leave deep imprints, on your nervous system, your sense of safety, and your ability to trust yourself.
If you’ve experienced emotional or narcissistic abuse, whether from a partner, parent, sibling, friend or someone in a position of authority, you may know the confusing cycle of charm followed by criticism, connection followed by control. Over time, it can chip away at your inner clarity until you’re left questioning your own reality.
This kind of trauma doesn’t just end when the relationship changes or ends.
But healing is possible, and it begins with coming back to yourself.
What Emotional Abuse Can Look and Feel Like
Emotional abuse isn’t always easy to name, especially when it’s wrapped in care, affection, apology, or promises to change.
It can happen in any type of relationship, romantic, familial, professional, or social, and often hides behind, love, loyalty or authority.
You might have experienced:
Gaslighting: being told your feelings or memories are wrong
Control disguised as concern: being isolated or manipulated “for your own good”
Shifting blame: feeling like you have to manage someone else’s emotions
Subtle shaming or constant criticism
Being made to feel responsible for everything that goes wrong
Even after the dynamic ends, the impact can linger; showing up as self-doubt, anxiety, hypervigilance, or emotional numbness.
Healing begins when you recognize that what happened wasn’t your fault, and start gently reconnecting with the parts of you that had to go quiet to stay safe.
You Are Not Broken, You Adapted
The ways you learned to cope, shutting down, over-explaining, people-pleasing, and second-guessing, weren’t weaknesses.
They were intelligent responses.
Your body and mind did what they needed to do to protect you.
Part of healing is honoring those survival strategies…
And gently beginning to ask: What would it feel like to live beyond them?
Rebuilding Trust in Yourself
After experiencing emotional abuse, trusting yourself again can feel like learning a new language.
But that trust was never truly lost; it was simply buried beneath layers of fear, confusion and conditioning.
You can begin to rebuild it by:
Listening for your inner voice, even when it’s unsure
Allowing your feelings instead of dismissing them
Honoring your boundaries, even when it feels uncomfortable
Letting yourself pause before saying yes
Small moments of self-honoring add up.
Over time, they become a path back to your own truth.
The Nervous System’s Role in Healing
Emotional abuse often puts the nervous system in a prolonged state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
That’s why healing can’t happen only in your mind; it also has to include your body.
Somatic (body-based) healing gently invites the body back into safety, one moment at a time.
This might look like:
Placing your hand on your heart when you feel overwhelmed
Noticing sensations that arise when you set a boundary
Grounding yourself when you’re triggered
Allowing your body move, shake, or rest when it needs to
You don’t have to fix everything at once.
Safety builds in layers, and your body knows the way.
A Soft Place to Land
Healing from emotional abuse takes time.
Some days it may feel like progress; others may feel like grief.
But every boundary, every truth spoken, every moment of self-kindness is part of the process of your becoming.
You are allowed to:
Take up space
Say no
Change your mind
Ask for what you need
Rest, even when the world expects more
You are not too much.
You are not too sensitive.
You are not to blame.
You are learning to live in truth again, and that is deeply brave.
If you’re healing from emotional abuse, whether in a family, workplace, friendship or intimate relationship, you don’t have to do it alone.
Together, we can create a space where you feel safe, supported and understood as you reconnect with yourself. Schedule a free consultation to explore what healing might look like for you. You deserve a supportive space to reconnect with who you’ve always been.